Self-Representation Issues - Essay Example

The autoportrait or self-portrait does raise critical questions about the fluid and plastic nature of identity; furthermore, the nature of self-representation manifests the subject-object tension in visually interesting ways. In the comparison of seven artists' self-portraits, this paper will attempt in a general way to elucidate some of these issue of self-ontological construction. Rather than contextualize each work individually, this paper will attempt to categorize and organize these works into a thematic framework that offers a less comprehensive but more theoretically efficacious explication. The themes that will underscore this analysis include: the mimetic characteristics of the portraits, the intentionality of the works, and the semiotic structures that underlie those representations vis--vis our understanding of the self and identity. Organized loosely around the principle that a mimetic representation is one that "looks like" the subject, or more specifically has a photographic component to its content, then the self portraits of Chuck Close, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol, and arguably Christian Schad are mimetic in nature. Provisionally, while the Christian Schad painting lacks a photographic realism that the others to some degree or another elicit, the facial features of Schad in the self-portrait insofar that they are meant to correspond to the actual features of someone's face do so successfully. One could reasonably suggest that they could imagine a human being looking like the character in the Schad painting. This notion of being human plays an important role in our theoretical development of identity. Our responses to human facial features are deeply programmed into our biology, our ability to recognize pain, ecstasy, surprise or indignation based on the slightest of facial movements is highly refined. Moreover, our penchant to anthropomorphize animal behaviors speaks to our deep desire to "find the human" in our world. Our concept of identity and self is intimately tied to the species of which we count ourselves as members. Thus some of the other pictures such as the Picasso, or The Tree of Life, or Psyche do not immediately strike us as examples of real people depicting their identity. This resistance derives from an inherent preference for human features, namely the eyes in order to properly judge identity. This preference is intimated by the phrase, "looking a person in the eyes," in order to gather something about who they are as people. This sort of species-mimetic cage of identity of self is exactly the sort of prison that the works of Ana Mendieta and Gina Pane are explicitly trying to escape. Though interestingly the photographically influenced works are not totally submissive to this warden of identity and each in their own way seeks to subtly subvert this dominant paradigm. Chuck Close is most intimately associated with the Photo-Realist school, whose emphasis was on technical mastery and detail. Though Close has worked with a number of different media formats, in this screenprint a photo is gridded and each individual block is then transposed onto a larger canvas. The work is intentionally pixilated to foreground this method, and as a result the notion of a photo-realistic portrayal of Close is oddly transformed into a somewhat fuzzy understanding of the identity of Chuck Close. One can choose to parse that in any number of ways, possibly that one "true" identity can never be literally transposed anywhere. Bruce Nauman's, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, seems less concerned about the nature of identity transposition and more focused on analyzing the semiotic chain between self and object. One might suggest that the print is a picture of some person spitting water out of his mouth and little else. The evidence for this is in fact compelling. Because of the photo-realistic image we are in little doubt that that person is or was in fact a human in existence somewhere in the world. In this sort of tactically blunt interpretation it might also be held that the water flowing out of this person's mouth offers nothing more than a "distraction" to the identity of Nauman. Yet it is this very distraction that Nauman wishes to foreground and ideologically center. This is a self-portrait as a fountain, the connection between personhood and identity is intended to be severed or at least seriously questioned. The question of who Bruce Nauman is in this photo has something to do with him being a fountain, not being a fountain as such, but included within the perception of identity of Bruce Nauman is some component of "fountainness." There is an impulse in the establishment of identity to make static certain ideas about the self, or the artist. A person's identity is often thought not subject to the same fluctuations that an idea, object, or even a person's hair color, body composition, or ideological commitments are. Ana Mendieta's work Arbol de la Vida seeks to undermine this rigid conception of identity by interpolating the tree as integral to her self-portrait. The semiotic structure of the tree sign includes notions of dynamism, growth, evolution, and change. This sign is visually and explicitly grafted into the self-portrait of Mendieta and as such her identity is constituted dynamically despite being frozen within the bark of a tree instantaneously captured in a moment of self-creation. In a self-portrait an artist often wishes to impart or transmit a message about him or herself above and beyond his or her physical characteristics. This intentionality is seen in Christian Schad's Self-Portrait with Model. Schad is closely associated with a German reaction to Expressionism known as New Objectivity or literally the "new dispassion." It was a movement intent on depicting the sort of crude underbelly of reality, ruthlessly and emotionlessly as the name of the movement indicates. Ironically, this sort of ruthless realism is often illustrated via a slight distortion or even making intentionally ugly the subject(s) of the painting. Schad in his self-portrait is doing just that. It is hardly to be doubted, if only naively, what purpose has brought these two characters together, though it could be argued at what stage, pre or post-coital are we seeing them. The model is transparently and insistently bored, while Schad, neither clothed nor naked, neither excited nor dejected, and despite being at the foreground of the painting is not the center of attention. Though Schad's facial features are not apparently distorted or seemingly made ugly; the model's features, including her mannish chiseled features, the prominent nose and heavy shading around the eyes all together suggest a rather un-erotic depiction. Finally, the noticeable scar on her left cheek is a metaphorical indication of the crude, banal nature of the act which has or is about to occur between them as they are certainly not lovers. The white flower which is placed between them is ambiguous as it is either an indication of missing purity, or acts as a foil to the ugliness which is occurring around it, its conspicuous suspension between the two of them acts as a barrier, though that chasm is even wider as a result of their radically askew glances. This self-portrait is not just a portrait of the artist's self; the locus of the artist's identity does not lie either in the male character or the female model, but somewhere in between, perhaps akin to the position of the flower, symbolically speaking. Identity it seems can also be constituted morally, or affectively, what particular situations we choose to place ourselves in, how we perform in those situations can reveal as much about our identity as what we look like or appear to be. In a further development of this trope, Gina Pane's artwork Psyche confronts us with a graphic performance of identity. The body itself becomes a medium for which to display one's identity, not as one would display her identity by using her body in a dance or as a "live sculpture," that is more a performance of identity transmitted through the body. Instead, Pane transmits identity on her body; her body is a surface on which to act out on. There is a sort of violence implied by this acting out, that violence most clearly emblematized by the use of blood or what appears to be blood as a visual representation of suffering, the sort of existential or psychological suffering that a person might attempt to hide or ignore. Here the subject/object distinction is completely obliterated, who Gina Pane is, densely intersects and is almost ontologically indistinguishable from the representation of who Gina Pane is, and as such the raw, and exposed self is thrown back onto itself and we are witness to its injuries. It is in this way that Self-portraits of others can often reveal much about who we are and how they can interrogate our own traditionally held beliefs about the nature of the self by throwing back those various constructions of other's identities onto ourselves. Read More